Tuesday, January 20

i think i've written more in the past few months
than any time before that, ever
except maybe when i was caught in a
correspondence that was somehow self-sustaining

i wonder what it says that my life
is bracketed and defined as much by
exchanges of letters
as anything else

these days i'm not happy with the words
i guess part of that is practice -
you can reach a place in doing anything
where you know what good is
better than you know how to make it

but bigger,
the other thing is that i keep forgetting
how to tell the truth
maybe it's easier to lie
when you're mostly talking to yourself

maybe i should abandon language altogether,
and take up drawing with such intensity
that i learn the shape of the world all over.

things

It's four-thirty in the morning, and if I'm not quite wide awake,
then I'm still closer than I ought to be.

A surprising number of people come here from search engines these days. And
while I am past being especially obsessed with hit counts and page views and
so forth, I continue to be fascinated by what
they're searching for.

By the 1970s, Seymour Papert had even small children creating little programs
with graphical outputs in his computer language "LOGO". The operative
word is "little." The moment programs grow beyond smallness, their
brittleness becomes the most prominent feature, and
software engineering
becomes Sisyphean.

search me

While I don't write about music in direct proportion to the amount I
think about music (it's much like sex in this regard), I do
drop lyrical quotes and song titles - those account for quite a few hits,
people looking for lyric pages, mp3s, and guitar tab. I guess it's possible
a few of them find something relevant. I mention local bands once in a while
and Google being what it is, I know some of those fine folks have probably
read what I've said about them. Odd thought, but kind of a gratifying
one. Of course the only band I can remember dissing was the Bastard Sons of
Johnny Cash - it might be less gratifying to know I'd contributed to the
overall level of critical suck in the world by heaping scorn on someone's
obscure but heartfelt project with no thought to their actually
noticing. (Any members of the Bastard Sons &c. who
stumble across this entry are encouraged to note that I'm
pretty sure that neither their critical reputations nor their self-confidence
will be damaged by my obscure project.)

Once the music-related hits are accounted for, things get a little more
interesting. Poetry is a big one, and Shakespeare crops up pretty regularly
- although not as often as when I took a Shakespeare class and posted
half-baked essays on the plays.

At least once a month I get someone obviously
thinking about that bit in Where the Red Fern Grows where they
trap a raccoon by drilling a hole in a log, putting something shiny at the
bottom, and driving nails in around the sides, points downward, so that
once the 'coon reaches in to grab the object it'll be unable to pull its
clenched paw out of the hole without letting go - and will refuse to let
go. No, I don't know if it works and probably won't find out, but I
do think that Where the Red Fern Grows is every bit as wonderful and
wrenching a book as it is supposed to be, and in the field
of utterly heartbreaking novels about dogs, generally makes Old
Yeller look like so much hash.

Most of this has got to be people trying to do homework for English
classes, but I guess there's encouragement in the thought that
a few people are interested. Maybe I can go somewhere with the poetry
thing. (As in somehow providing a useful access to that for someone.)

It's also just strange what things scattered around the
mostly dormant wiki will draw hits. There's not
much there, and it can't exactly be the definitive resource on, say,
the methodology of laundry or Hungary's role in the Second World War.
I suppose this serves to emphasize how shallow a construct the web
still is in terms of most subjects.

some search strings for the month of january,

arranged in an
arbitrary table likely to choke screenreading software. My apologies
to anyone not using a visual client; I won't do it again.